Show HN: Emoodji – Live emoji-powered emotion and facial tracking - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mjkaufer/Emoodji <comment><USER2> Unfortunately it haven't worked very well for me - quickly changing emojis, completely unrelated to my face

<comment><USER3> I experienced the same, until I removed my glasses. It still wasn't particularly good at matching the correct expression, but it was better (and stopped the rapid changing).</comment></comment>


YouTube gets a new CEO - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/05/susan-wojcicki-youtube-ceo/ <comment><USER2> I believe a person that knows a thing or two about ads could turn how YouTube uses them into something less... awful. Let's see.</comment>


Ask HN: Why don't more UK graduates want to join start-ups? - <AUTHOR>

Last May we organised a recruitment fair in London for UK hackers to meet local start-ups. YC companies included Lanyrd, Songkick, Tuxebo and Webmyd. It got more traction than we expected with hundreds of attendees. More details at www.siliconmilkroundabout.com
We announced a follow up event this Sunday that has had a strange response pattern. We've had thousands of registrations, but they're mostly from experienced developers rather than current students and recent graduates. My personal goal for the event is to help graduates see that there are more options out there than just the obvious banking/consulting/Google routes so I'm trying to make sure we also reach current students.
The event is free to attend, showcases 500+ roles at over 100 UK based start-ups from Mind Candy to Shazam but hasn't yet gotten real traction at universities across the UK despite hitting mailing lists, flyering etc.
Does anyone on hacker news have any ideas on how we could increase awareness of the event amongst current UK CS students? Do we have to take the event to campuses like the banks do with their milkrounds?
If you're a UK CS or engineering student have you heard about the event? If not what would have been the best way to reach you? What career options are more visible on campus (banks, Google etc)?
Thanks! Ian (co-founder Songkick) <comment><USER4> I'm a founder of Lyst, one of the companies who will be involved in the event. I have two theories about why the traction for so-to-be graduates hasn't been amazing.

1) Location. While London is definitely business and cultural center of Britain, I believe it's a bit of a slog for students to travel down to the recruitments fair, especially since most of the best universities are located outside of the city. SO going to them would definitely help.

2) Most of the companies pitching are relatively unknown to the general masses. My best hires are people who either approached us because they like why we're doing, or people in my professional circles. Professional developers fit nicely into these two buckets, were most students don't. Great companies like Tuxebo and Conversocial don't really have mass appeal. Subsequently, it's hard to get a student who doesn't truly understand the company/space excited about being a part of the team.

The second problem is even further exacerbated as early startups don't want "employees". They want "Employee #1"; someone who is passionate and ready to help push the company forward.

It's a tricky problem.

<comment><USER5> _The second problem is even further exacerbated as early startups don't want "employees". They want "Employee #1"; someone who is passionate and ready to help push the company forward._

I'm in my senior year of college here in the US and this definitely nails it for me. I've had some solid internships where I've done actual coding / ops / etc, but I don't feel like I'm at the technical level where I could graduate and make huge impacts for a startup.

Are startups who are past the "Employee #1" phase (or even employees 2-5, I'd imagine) in a different position in regards to this? (ie more willing to bring on a recent grad, because they already have strong technical employees/leadership pushing the company forward)

<comment><USER4> My company is early stage still & we still have a very high bar for developers. That said, I hire based on a persons ability to perform, not the time they've been doing it.

If you have a github & portfolio that shows you can create, have an interest in what my company does, and can pitch it to me, I'd hire you.

<comment><USER5> Maybe this is something that many grads might not realize too, as it's quite different in contrast with hiring processes associated with Enterprise Company XYZ.

It's one of my favorite parts about startup culture in general, though. Whenever I hear people saying stuff like this (re: hiring performance vs experience) my first thought is almost always "where do I sign up?!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think a lot of students just aren't aware it's possible... All through uni, literally zero people told me startups even existed as an option. No professor, no career counsellor, no guest speaker... nobody.

I accidentally signed up for a course called "project proposal" thinking it was about submitting research to conferences, but it was actually about pitching ideas to VCs. Rocked my world.

Although it wasn't quite what I imagine they were hoping for, I dropped out after that semester and have spent the last 5 years happily entrenched in startups.

My best guess would be that they do not know the option exists and/or they do not believe they can do it. It does and they can.

So spread the word!

<comment><USER7> Plus there is also the legacy fear that start-ups are a risk. Students aim for big companies and recognised brands as it's entrenched in their psyche that they must build a decent CV from the minute they step out into the big bad world.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's somewhat mitigated as the UK develops a few more household name brand start-ups like Moshi Monsters and Shazam but I agree it's an issue.

I think the key point we need to make there is that as a developer you want to go wherever you'll learn the most, and start-ups credibly offer that - both by exposure to the broader aspects of building a successful business and also by density of talent.

<comment><USER8> I don't think you can call Moshi Monsters and Shazam a 'startup' anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few guesses:

a) The likes of Morgan Stanley, PWC and suchlike put a lot of effort into always being at the forefront of student minds, by sponsoring societies, etc. That often means they are the default first choice. They also organise a ton of events to show students how nice they are.

b) Money. No getting away from this one. A decent starting salary might be in the region of 25k, the companies mentioned above usually pay somewhere around 35k. That 10k makes a huge difference after 3-4 years of living in squalor.

c) Inexperience. Coming out of university a job is more-or-less a job. You write some code, get paid, that's it. It takes a bit of personal experience to fully appreciate the corporate reality of legacy code, bureaucracy and incompetence. In my experience it often takes those encounters with the beast that is corporate coding to make you run for the hills or startups.

d) Peers and parental pressure. Your mates are all getting golden hand shakes and nice lunches at Big Corp, it is natural to want the same. Also, when you get that job offer from PWC or similar, your parents' eyes light up with excitement and they run off to tell all their friends about it. When you get a job at a three man company, their reaction is likely to be mild confusion at best. Sad but true.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all great points. On a) perhaps we need to use the milkroundabout brand to start sponsoring stuff during the year, similar to how the larger corporations do. On d) I totally agree with that. My main hack around that has been to try to have dinner with the parents/partners of those joining us to try to get them to buy into the opportunity and people behind the start-ups as well. That's also one area where in the UK, having brand name investors like YC and Index behind you really helps.

<comment><USER10> Definitely makes sense for milkroundabout to sponsor events and build awareness of startups in general. Individual startups don't have the resources and longevity to continuously be building awareness over the long term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been really lucky, straight out of university I've managed to only work with startups. I've had the opportunity to work with a few startups to get them to a first release [I graduated and moved to Germany helping startups as a contractor].

But generally, working for startups isn't mentioned as an option to students at _any_ point during their course. This is perhaps an issue with university faculty, they probably assume it's not an option since they don't have any contacts to any startups. Placing a call to Microsoft recruitment is easy.

Another reason might be an issue with the education students receive at university, I feel as if only 10 students out of a class of 120 people will know how to program correctly. Startups normally want people with lots of knowledge in many different areas, they don't want people who only know how to do certain things; Hiring a graduate who can only code HTML isn't normally an option for startups since they need the most out of the little money that have.

Until at least 50% of a graduating class are able to perform in multiple areas, backend, front-end, perhaps mobile in multiple languages (they don't have to know them amazingly well, but enough to program efficiently whilst checking documentation – when needed!), startups aren't really an option for most graduates. You would be amazed at how many students can't debug problems in their code, because they're taught to just copy code they find on the internet or on some sort of Blackboard style intranet app.

TL;DR: Students graduate with piss poor skills and until more students graduate with the needed skills, they'll never find themselves in a startup.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a recent graduate and I attended the previous milkroundabout.

Let me start by saying that I've always hated recruitment fairs — you're treated like cattle and rarely get to speak to companies (read: HR departments) properly. I found it to be a similar situation with the milkroundabout event only instead of HR departments it was founders and developers.

I don't agree with "selling the brand" of milkroundabout as it will easily be confused with similarly named events/sites/companies. Instead aim to do guest lectures at universities on topics that are bound to get students interested.

If you're the ones with interesting work, why aren't you talking about what you do? Students already get told that they are under prepared for what working life is like and you can expose them to what you've done. You could easily compare this to what life was like at <insert safe boring company> before. If you're so inclined.

Pick topics that are interesting to the students that you want to attract. Then go on a tangent about start-ups, the culture, and the experience. If you show students what it's like to be in a start-up, they'll get involved and tell their friends.

In summary, sell them a better lifestyle than the usual suspects.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be curious to hear how you found the last event? Our goal was that all the start-up booths would be staffed by developers at the start-ups, so you'd be able to find out what the culture and experience of their start-up was like, directly. Did that happen? Sounds like it was much like a typical recruitment fair for you, which is a failure on our part.

<comment><USER12> _> Our goal was that all the start-up booths would be staffed by developers at the start-ups, so you'd be able to find out what the culture and experience of their start-up was like, directly._

Yes, but not as much as I'd like to. I found it far too easy to get stuck in a slow-moving crowd or just wait in a queue to talk.

In the end I just stayed by the bar near the bar staff and talked to developers as they went to grab a beer. It seemed to work better and the devs were far more relaxed talking with a beer in hand. Same goes for outside when they went to grab a cigarette.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I left university I interviewed at a small company and a startup but in both cases they were just interviews for jobs I got through a recruitment consultant. That was all I knew of how to get a job. I think the problem is that recent graduates are unaware they could be doing anything other than looking at cwjobs and phoning a recruitment agency up.

Possibly timing is an issue, right before or after final exams may catch students when getting a job is more top of mind?

One other idea might be to organise some paid internships. If you have a large number of companies in willing to take interns on (point them to Joels 'smart and gets things done' if they want to see the benefits of getting smart people interested in their company before they leave education) then that may give the CS departments a reason to get undergraduates interested in a startup career.

Good luck with the event this weekend, it looks fantastic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Paid summer internships is a smart point. Many of the companies exhibiting at the event are keen to having summer tech interns, and perhaps if we packaged that up better we'd get more engagement from university tutors. Maybe we should create a listing of all the summer internships available as well. Thanks for a helpful idea.

<comment><USER14> I think this would create a lot of interest in the start-up area. As part of my course there was a compulsory 6-month placement in industry. Most of the students were blissfully unaware of the start-up opportunities available, especially when the big players were dangling large money incentives and holding big promotion events. Also, if you took a typical internship with a bank, etc, the chances are that you got offered a graduate job. This in itself would prevent a lot of the students looking further for other opportunities even if they were being promoted.

The only time I even had a hint of the start-up world was the odd email from the career officer. (I actually remember the SongKick advert. I was really tempted to apply, even though you were just looking for a graduate position. In hindsight, I should have tried my luck :))

What would be useful in promoting the internships would be a start-up demo- day, where bunch of start-ups would come in and showcase their product/vision, development technologies, and any other 'cool stuff'.

Edit: To clarify, rather that a start-up fair, where students stumble about, the demo-day would be contained in a lecture room with a proper presentation and QA session. These types of events were always packed in uni.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback, thanks. I think some kind of on campus event is the next step and I love the idea of making it about product demos not standard booths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm currently a student (in Holland), and I've been to a few recruitment fairs and if I were to get an email or see a flyer about another one I would probably not even read it. Most recruitment fairs are just terrible. Companies will send the prettiest girls they can find in their HR and PR departments with the sole goal of getting your contact info plus some buzzwords so they can add those to their database. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against pretty girls, but they're not actually interested in me as a person nor do they have a lot of knowledge about the company which usually makes recruitment fairs a big waste of time.

On campus presentations on the other hand are a fantastic way of putting yourself on the radar. I don't mean the recruitment fairs that some Uni's will have on campus, but rather smaller events. I recently went to the final presentation of a phd project and there were 4-5 companies giving a short talk what they did in that field and afterwards they had stands with demos and the actual people who get their hands dirty were there to talk to you (extensively). To me the latter (where it's directly related to a topic I might be interested in) is much more interesting and inspiring than some impersonal recruitment fair.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great post! I'm an MSc Tech Entrepreneurship student with a software background and would either join an existing startup or launch my own. I'm actually attending the silicon milkroundabout event this Sunday.

I can relate to the problem in the following ways:

(1) Culture - The UK and Europe in general does not have the same 'entrepreneurship spirit' like they do in the US. The vast majority are looking for stability, rather than risk and rewards (both personal and financial). A recent article published in the telegraph stated that my university (UCL), has the highest number of graduates going into self- employment, and the figure was still just 2.4%, so you can imagine the rest. <http://tgr.ph/tTMHaJ>

(2) Value - There not so many people from a software background in my course (around 10%), so I tried to reach out to undergraduate Computer Science students in the same department in order to organise something similar to the silicon milkroundabout, but just for students on campus, i.e. match up budding tech entrepreneurs with developers and aspiring hackers. We received less than 3% interest, which kind of reflects the newspaper figure. I don't think they see the value of joining a start-up at the early stage. <http://econ.st/uOw02e>

(3) Presence - In the last few months, even though the term has just started I've received a lot of emails about recruitment fairs on campus with banks, financial institutions, large corporate IT companies etc. These are normally oversubscribed and I'm sure a lot of these graduates will end up in those companies, as they are recruited whilst still in their final year. Perhaps finance might be a factor as well. A lot of people can't afford to work for 'shares and equity' after graduating with thousands of pounds in student debts, they would rather clear or reduce those as quickly as possible.

So, I would say, if you want to get more students taking part rather than established developers, you would need to come to campus and organise events there. Maybe do a tour around UK universities. Someone I met at a recent techmeetups event is actually founding a startup that teaches kids in school how to write python code. If they start early they are more likely to do it out of interest, rather than to get a secure job with a bank.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm currently a masters student at UCL and I'm too surprised at the small scale of start-up culture here. I've been talking to many london universities to bring hackers and start-up enthusiasts together to collaborate and see what everyone is working on. Numbers are small, but there is talent out there working on cool ideas.

In my opinon in this case it's a matter of exposure, here at UCL I didn't see any advertisements about siliconmilkroundabout; and I bet more non-technical founders knew about it than computer scientists. Universities are a hard one to crack, you really have to target down hard to the societies(techsoc) and the right areas (malet place).

<comment><AUTHOR> what could we do in the next 3 days to really crank up awareness at UCL? We have posters, fliers and can send someone from Songkick or another start-up down to speak about the event and the start-ups that will be represented. Thanks!

<comment><USER18> I'm sure some guys at the UCL Hatchery would be willing to help spread the word too. Email me at email@example.com and I'll put you guys in touch.

<comment><AUTHOR> will do, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ian,

I currently work at onefinestay, one of the attendees at milkroundabout. (I am the one that has been feeding @milkroundabout with some 'reasons why you should work in startups' via Tiff Philippou)

I came to the company from KPMG, having spent 4 years 'earning' my ACA. Those 4 years would have been far better spent learning the operational and technical ropes at a start up but it did give me an understanding of finance and all it entails.

I agree with a number of opinions below that might stifle traction - <USER2> expectation of job/employer/salary, lack of visibility of start ups, location of the Milkroundabout. (Could there be mini satellite events linked by webcasts/interactive discussion boards/MMOG type virtual event?)

But a key one is simply 'What can I/would I do?' Large multinationals have very defined learning and career paths usually linked to professional qualifications that, theoretically at least, will give them at platform in this uncertain world. Start ups offer no standard day/week/year which is their greatest selling point (to those who have tasted corporate life!) but can be daunting for those fresh out of a structured school system. Also for non CS grads - what roles are available to them that they can research prior to graduating.....

There might be an opportunity to develop a learning framework that encompasses the necessary skills that 'Start ups' require and provide support to these new joiners as well as more information from recent employees as to their back ground and current role.

Jed

jed(dot)comyn(At)onfinestay(dot)com

</comment><comment><USER20> I think your idea is superb, but your website would be better if there was a way to search through all the available jobs to see if there is anything in particular of interest.

For instance, it would be useful to be able to see which funded companies were looking for a junior designer and then be able to look at the actual job postings themselves (e.g. via link to that company's website).

I hope you have great success with this event. I have a friend attending and there's a good chance I will come down from Leeds one day to take a look at one of your future events.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We'll consider adding a list of all available jobs, that's a good idea.

Re Leeds - how did your friend who is coming hear about the event? Are there email lists that we should have targeted that we didn't?

<comment><USER21> When I lived in Leeds I used to attend the Open Coffee meetings (monthly) and the BarCamps (annually), where people would talk about start-ups and start-up events, so you could target these meetings (if they are still going). I doubt you could target students directly without appearing to be spammers.

You (perhaps collectively with other roundabouters) could try holding some sort of competition for students. I am sure academics at universities would help to promote something like that to their students and you would be able to see which students are capable of building things and getting things done, i.e. which are potential hires. It could also expose students to the types of work, and the style of working, that occurs at a start-up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hi Ian

Firstly kudos on your patience and determination with Silicon Milk Roundabout. I've been a remote admirer of the project and I hope at some point I'll be able to engage more directly with the project, not least when it comes to our (www.kayako.com) own hiring. Silicon Roundabout and everything else associated with it is something I feel strongly about.

As far as reaching out to CS and engineering (etc) soon-to-be-graduates, have you been in touch with computer science and engineering faculties in universities, making an introduction and asking for them to send an email out to students?

Even easier would be to contact the social/ents society for the CS department/engineering faculties. Those societies will be more willing to send an email blast about careers events like these.

For example: <http://cssbristol.co.uk/> <http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/societies/COGS/> <http://www.cs-society.co.uk/site/>

Another idea might be the British Computer Society. They have a Young Professionals Group (I've posted about SMR to the LinkedIn group), and the main body of BCS would probably be more than happy to help with promotion.

Hope this helps and apologies if it was all already obvious and tried.

Edit: Seems I am late with a couple of those suggestions. Oh well, I'll keep thinking.

<comment><USER22> Thinking out loud... I think one of the problems is that on-campus careers events feel like bubbles. There isn't an obvious incentive for undergrads outside of London to travel to the event.

Some kind of representation at Universities themselves would solve this. Whether that is a small presence at a careers fair representing an annual SMR event in London, or perhaps (even better) a visiting speaker from a startup telling their startup story and to promote the actual idea of working for a startup.

As others before me have suggested, I think the barrier to getting students to the event isn't just about event logistics and promotion, but about culture and perceptions about startups too.

Does the startup route even cross their mind to begin with?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This may be a bit of quiet topic now but I still thought I'd throw in my comments.

I interned at a start up in my penultimate year and it was both a great experience, and I got paid (not a lot, but enough). I got to learn about business practices quickly, I did some meaningful work and contributed towards several products, we practised agile methods and it was all round a good experience. There was, however, more legacy code here than I've had to deal with before.

In my final year I started applying to more start ups (in London this time), and got offers from a number of them, I didn't take any of them. Why? They all wanted me to work for free. Working for free in central London? I don't need the experience of an unknown company that bad (harsh CV reality).

So I instead did the usual and got a (well paying) internship at a big bank. I had a great time, didn't run into very much legacy code, worked with lots of very cool, and very new, technologies, and learnt a lot about technology and business. It didn't take much consideration when deciding to take their job offer afterwards, turning down my MSc offers.

The kind of work I was going to be doing from day one mattered a lot to me, and it didn't seem to be much of a comparison. There just really wasn't much to entice me into a startup again.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hi Guys,

I'm a recent grad (just over 2 years ago now) and I have a startup in the UK. I'll be honest this is the first time I've heard about the event.

I think grads / final years are even more scared now than ever about finding a job and while that makes it a perfect time to try and start you own thing, I worry it just adds even more risk to a what they feel is already a dismal employment situation.

At Bath Uni we had an excellent Career's service however and if you wanted to do campus events or even just mailers, I would recommend getting in touch with university career centres. You can even ask them to pass your details on to the CS department and getting them the mail the event (yes, spam in a way) it to all the CS students. They did that at Bath if it was particularly relevant.

It may just be a case of students getting tired of all these career fairs which often don't amount to anything. I know in my final year, by the time I'd seen KPMG/Accenture/Deloitte/Barclays/BT/HP/etc I couldn't take any more being deceived about "fantastic opportunities". Perhaps posting this question to HN and undertaking some Twitter buzz if you can will attract the right sort of people to your event more than career emails.

Anyway, good luck with the event! Great that these things even happen in the UK, Rob

</comment><comment><USER25> Have you contacted universities directly? I studied at the University of Birmingham and they had a named contact for getting in touch with students. That person often forwarded relevant communication (job opportunities, recruitment events) to us and I took my first job based on one of those emails.

I agree with robfitz that people don't talk about startups. The companies that do the milkround are the usual suspects. Accenture, Deloitte, Procter and Gamble etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> We've reached out to a ton of university career services and CS & engineering departments. Some have been very helpful, for example the team at Queen Mary have been amazing and probably 50% of their CS students are coming down. But many of the others have been a lot less engaged and willing to promote to their student body, vs the tried and tested options of banks & consultancies.

Do you think we should take the siliconmilkroundabout on tour? I'm wondering if part of the issue is that we don't have our own stall alongside the usual suspects you name.

<comment><USER25> That's great - shame on the others for not passing it on.

Clearly the big boys visit universities because they have the resources to do so. If siliconmilkroundabout were to visit on behalf of a body of startups this would clearly be more efficient than every startup trying to send one man. I'd love to see this happen and I think it would have a huge impact on students, especially given the contrast with other visitors. How it is funded would be an issue and perhaps donors would see their company specifically promoted but I think that can be worked out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we'll start looking into it. Should be possible. Maybe create a rota scheme where a couple of founders staff each table which would allow us to hit hundreds of milkround events over a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A good discussion.

There are a variety of reasons as to why this occurs, particularly in the uk. The most prominent is the lack of awareness of joining a start-up as an achievable or even applicable career option.

NACUE, the business which I work on, encompasses a network of 40,000 enterprising students. And our biggest barrier is enabling students and grads to understand that are different modes of being entrepreneurial post graduation, and therefore 3 career options: 1\. Launching a company 2\. Being entrepreneurial whilst working for one of the big boys - an intrapreneur 3\. Joining a start-up team

The third has the greatest potential. Given the thriving start-up community in London and others areas, and still, the record graduate unemployment.

We're working on raising the awareness of the above problem. Looking to launch a programme next year - this can hopefully tie into the milkround.

Lastly, I don't think you need to be on campus. What we all need is to be visible, and that is achieved through networks (i.e. ADCAS, EEUK) and online, social media - that's where they're engaged.

I've promoted this across network - have a good one this weekend. Also, based in Old Street if you want to share some ideas. <USER26>
</comment><comment><USER27> I've registered for the event this year but I graduated in '05 in CS/IS so I guess I match the pattern you have been seeing.

When I graduated I barely knew that startups existed and I certainly didn't know they needed grads.

I went to a Uni that had an associated business park and those companies advertised on the student job board.

I did a graduate scheme with one of those companies but I wish I'd had more exposure to startups and associated events.

Is there a central list of these 500+ roles? Not so people can apply but so students know before hand that they are suited to the positions.

Maybe it's the nature of CS students, it's a pretty daunting time - <USER3> meeting recruiting companies face to face. It's hard to know what to say for yourself if all you've got is a degree in hand.

For the average grads it feels like the competition would be just way to high.

With a few years of work experience it's much easier to go and chat to recruiters as you've got confidence in the projects you've worked on.

I don't know if any of the roles at the event will be suited to me this Sunday but I'm going anyway because I'd love to talk to some of the companies that are there.

I don't think I would have done that as a grad.

<comment><AUTHOR> look forward to hopefully meeting you on sunday and would love any feedback you have on how it goes for you.

I think the idea of a central list is a good one, and others have suggested that too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hi Ian, I'm a 2nd year CS student at the University of Bristol. Out of everyone I know on the course, I'm the only one that regularly reads HN/Techcrunch and has an interest in start-ups; it's also how I found out about siliconmilkroundabout.

The start-up path isn't at all prominent here and I think there's a few reasons for this: Lack of presence of start-ups at recruitment/careers fairs (it's all the big names). The compulsory Hi-Tech units on the course aren't done right - hours of lectures filled with slides rather than guest speakers from start-ups, case studies, or any interactive processes whatsoever. Little to no communication between start-ups and students (groups or individuals) using social media or otherwise. Everyone sees messages posted on our CS FB group but nobody really reads the emails sent through the CS HR.

I think your best bet is to communicate directly with Society heads (i.e. students) such as Computer Science society or entrepreneurship society and to organise some guest speaker events. Lastly I think it's really important for students to know how they can help your start-up - specifically what skills they would need and what they would learn as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ian, I think it comes down to the fact that graduates here in London and the rest of the UK aren't all that interested in startups as a whole. Having studied at a top London uni and having friends doing CS degrees at Imperial, UCL etc, none of them even considered joining a startup. It seems as though all of these graduates have their heart set on joining investment banking/trading - this is largely based on what they think the job is like, but after they join, they realise it sucks but the money is pretty good they just put up with it. This is based on 10+ of my friends working in banking and hating the hours and the work.

We need to foster more of a startup culture within university campuses, right now 99% of graduates don't even think about joining a startup - it just doesn't even come into their mind, totally focused on joining a blue chip.

Finally, many (not all!) of the startups here in London don't even have a proper business model and haven't made a profit despite being established for years. So that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the top CS graduates they hope to attract.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'll ask a question or three back at you. Why do you want graduates to work at startups? Why do you think this is a desirable thing to champion?

I've just been looking at one of your companies (<http://www.entrepreneurfirst.org.uk>) which has a free entreppreneurship course for final year students and recent grads (2 years). And I have friend who's been working for 3 years and was recently knocked back for a role because she had passed the 2 year recent grad mark and was therefore unsuitable.

So there seems to be a mindset that society must mold students in a certain way and force them in certain directions perhaps before they are ready? And if they take a few more years to become ready then they must now be treated differently.

I guess my final question is, 'Are you sure that you're not making a mistake by singleing out students'?

</comment><comment><USER30> It also might be worth getting in touch with Student Unions as some students might have entrepreneur societies that have final years that would be interested. As well as Math and Computer societies.

Generally I've found that the Unions might be more willing to spread the word to the students than the universities.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've hit quite a few entrepreneur societies but not really student unions. We'll look into that. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> No doubt the attraction of big companies is strong for grads, and for good reasons. A positive observation is that post-grad Entrepreneurship programs attract a lot of people who went straight to big companies and then figured out that startups were a better option for them. So grads who get it just take a year or 3 to become aware of the option.

I wonder if the answer lies with these recent alumni, and if there's a way to share their experience with the doey-eyed undergrads job-seekers.

Maybe Milkroundabout needs to bring it into the schools, and enable alumni as the awareness vector. Or maybe Milkroundabout could turn some attention to rescuing former grads already employed at big companies, rather than focusing solely on the newest grads.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think many of the current registrants (of which there are thousands) are people who are 1-5 years into their career post uni and are realising they maybe went in the wrong direction by joining a bank/microsoft etc. So we're actually doing a good job of reaching that community.

I really like the idea of using alumni as an awareness vector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think there's a couple of issues. First, there's probably a bias on the part of graduates to take a job with what they perceive to be a safe, secure company that will look good on their CV. I think that tendency is a cultural thing here in the UK - there's more of a tendency for people here to work _for_ companies for their entire career and, hence, there's traditionally been a cachet attached to working for big companies. That's something that's likely to change over time, though.

Another factor is likely to be a bias on the part of universities towards building relationships with larger employers who are seen as prestigious. An unheard-of startup won't garner anywhere near the interest and attention of a large, well-known company.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are you working with uni staff to get the word out? Staff at programmes like <http://www.ucl.ac.uk/msi/study/technology-entrepreneurship> would probably be keen to promote it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are, and have contacted a large number of list moderators for careers/CS/entrepreneurship etc. I'll double check if we have reached out to that one. Thanks

<comment><USER32> Nowadays unis get ranked partly on what % of their grads are in employment x number of months after graduating, so its important to them to get graduates placed in jobs. I've come across a Computer Science department having a careers contact, who emails out vacancies to students. Maybe you might get somewhere by contacting unis and trying to get these careers contacts? (assuming a few of them do this?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was a business graduate (Nottingham) & we were never pitched startups either.

I was very willing to join a startup, but I also tend to rail against the Silicon Roundabout. I'm just personally not that interested in London.

Are many of these companies based elsewhere?

It's funny because something like this would do very well with Nottingham students. The dedicated business campus also has many computer science students, but we really only ever heard of the usual companies.

Have you looked at the Institute for Enterprise and Innovation on the Nottingham Business Campus, for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> For this event, all the start-ups are London based, but there's no reason this couldn't be replicated nicely at Nottingham and other emerging UK start-up hubs

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> A pet hate of mine - the companies page just has a list of icons. Put a short mission statement next to each so people don't have to click through to a hundred different websites just to find out if they are interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good feedback. We are distributing a document to all who register with more details on each company & their roles prior to the event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It would be interesting to have some feedback from startups as well. Have they got many hires from the first fair? What kind of hires?

My intuition is that, on one hand, most graduates do not meet expectations of startups. A startup needs exceptional people to push technology forward. On the other hand, startups presented at the fair do not meet expectations of potential employees. They are not "cool enough". (I registered for the event in May but after looking at the list of companies decided that it was not worth trouble going from Oxford to London.)

</comment><comment><USER36> Imperial College academic here. I haven't seen any fliers or posters around college today so this might have something to do with your lack of uptake. This is in contrast to the event you had earlier in the year which was prominently advertised around the place.

Also I noticed there is a careers fair happening today, predominantly big engineering firms/consultancies/banking, and I didn't see if you had any representation there (apologies if you do and I missed it).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sean - thanks very much for stepping in and for the suggestions. We can send some people along to the careers fair today but have also fliered over the college. In general Imperial Careers have not been very responsive so perhaps there's a CS focused liaison we should be talking to instead? Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> May sound weird, but don't forget the Job Centre. I got a previous job at a startup via the Job Centre. My employers hadn't thought of advertising there until Business Link or some entreprisey support place like that suggested it. They've got a good job search facility. Don't think it costs anything to advertise a job there. People mistakenly think people only go there to collect dole but actually it is a place to look for a job too!

</comment><comment><USER37> Why focus on just CS and engineering degrees? I was a Physics student, knew more about code than some CS undergrads and wasn't alone in that regard. You'll also find a lot of generally smart people who you can teach to code here.

I'll second the point many have made about money. It's hard to resist one of the big banks offering you £40k+ straight out of university.

<comment><USER32> I probably sound like a broken record on HN, but this is surely a big part of the problem - living costs in London. Even £40k doesn't give a great standard of living in London, due to ridiculous accommodation and transport costs. I think that startups should locate somewhere much cheaper but still attractive to grads, somewhere north. Examples - Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle.

<comment><USER38> _> Even £40k doesn't give a great standard of living in London_

That all depends on your definition of "great standard of living". I started out on £20k and have never felt that I was slumming it in London.

<comment><USER32> Fair point. My personal definition of a reasonable living standard, is being able to save a house deposit and eventually buy a 2-up 2-down terraced house, without forgoing all social life or basic no frills holidays. Such as house costs £70-80k in a cheap part of a northern city, £120k in a more up-market part, and, as for London, well maybe its under £300k on the very last stop on a tube line - Morden for example. In London you're likely to end up in a shared apartment for years. It might be a nice apartment, with good housemates, but it'll never be yours, and what happens when you get married and have kids? Lots of people answer "well then I move a 45 min train ride away". My other definition of decent standard of living involves not paying out thousands of £ to catch a stressful crowded train every day. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This event was advertised on campus at UCL, but not specifically within the CS department. We received an email through JobOnline, but that's a service which you have to sign up to.

I have just sent out an email to all students in the Computer Science department; there were also flyers in the Engineering Cafe here which is the main hub for technical students.

</comment><comment><USER40> as a vaguely recent graduate, and living in london, I was surprised that I hadn't heard of this until I read it here on HN.

Also (and this is totally personal) the Brick Lane location would have put me off a) because it's the other side of London, but mainly b) I have always perceived brick lane (and there abouts) as a London counter- culture/socialism/arty/etc scene, and events there abouts tend to follow that stereo type (for example look at the difference between the New Designers (<http://www.newdesigners.com/>) show and Free Range(<http://www.free- range.org.uk/)>). I have no problem with that now, but straight out of uni I was obsessed by money and one thing that a brick lane location doesn't scream to the high heavens is just that: money...

</comment><comment> All-ln Hey,guys,I'm moving to London in a couple of weeks and would like to ask you some questions about UCL/Imperial and the startup scene in general.Is there some relevant forum(not studentroom.co.uk)? If not,due to lack of PM system on YC,if any of you replies to my email firstname.lastname@example.com,would appreciate it.Thank you

</comment><comment><USER41> I have only just heard about this event and only because a friend sent me this article on twitter. I have had a quick search but can't find any accounts for this event on twitter. If you guys had an account you could send us details on there then with one retweet, all my coursemates would know about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have set up a twitter about the event, and would love if you could help retweet it to your coursemates. It's here: <http://twitter.com/#!/milkroundabout>

Which university are you currently studying at, and outside of twitter, what would have been the best way to help make you and your classmates aware of the event?

<comment><USER41> I have recently finished at Brighton university and so me and my mates are all looking for jobs. Other companies in the past have got students to promote for them, posting on the university intranet, facebook groups etc. I can't make this event but I hope you do another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It might be a good idea to organize a brainstorming event to figure out how to attract more students/graduates to startups. When I worked in the financial industry I was involved in running grad recruitment schemes, so I'd be happy to chip in.</comment>


Show HN: Mighty Spring – Passive job search - <AUTHOR> https://www.mightyspring.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks potentially interesting, but the fees seem awfully high for an automated matching service compared to standard recruitment agencies. Which is to say, ones with actual recruiters doing search, vetting and so on. Yes, there is always the advertised "standard rate" that may be something crazy like 25-40% of starting salary, but the actual negotiated rate is always much, much lower than that. 15% generally gets you a very high standard of professional recruitment services, not something that is basically monster.com without the massive candidate-base.

The pay per interview rates seem much more sensible, but that's a model that might be seen as high-risk, particularly if there is no pre-vetting of candidates. That's not something the site mentions at all in either the employer or candidate FAQ, but is a pretty important part of the recruitment agency model.

Also, I'm in the UK and the site seems pretty US-centric with no information about which regions are targeted or even supported. It should really be stated pretty clearly up-front - is the focus just on Silicon Valley, or startups anywhere in the world?

<comment><USER3> Hey Robert, good points here, but we're actually not entirely automated. We still do some manual things (we're a small startup, after all), which keeps the quality of folks seen by our employers high.

All of this said, we hope to not be in the contingency recruiting business forever. We feel that there is a friendlier fee structure to implement (with better incentives for companies and candidates alike), which we will do as our marketplace grows.

RE: UK jobs, most of the companies who have signed up are in the Bay Area and NYC right now, but there are no strict limitations to prevent UK companies from participating. We do have candidates in the UK that have signed up, FYI.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply. FWIW, you might want to consider focusing on key regions only during your early stages. I've seen problems with similar lack of geographic focus on sites before. While it's tempting to just say "we're open to everyone" it doesn't always work like that in practice.

If you are not getting enough traffic in a particular area, it can be worthwhile to close it down completely - preferably temporarily - and then come back to it with a targeted launch at some future time once the core regions are self-sustaining.

So for instance, you could organise some UK-centric marketing, with some PPC, etc., and maybe go speak at some UK events or something around the same time. This will hopefully get you a critical mass of interest in a short period of time, while in the meantime you get to focus on your core demographic.

Otherwise you can end up wasting a lot of time on stuff that isn't working for anyone - if you don't have enough candidates and recruiters in the same place at the same time, those people are potentially just going to go away with a bad impression of the service, so in the long run you actually lose potential clients.

If you can get that same number of people onto the site in a month instead of over the course of a year, it'll work out much better. If you leave it entirely to organic growth, that probably won't happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for giving the GitHub "Connect public account" higher visibility! I still think it should be the default, though. I've got a stack of NDAs as high as my client list and if I accidentally clicked through and approved the "Connect full account" button, I'd be in a world of legal hurt.

I _do_ trust your good intentions! I don't think your goal in business is to get full access to all of my clients' repos for nefarious purposes. Nonetheless, legally that's not a judgement call I'm allowed to make.

<comment><USER3> Awesome! Glad you saw and liked the change. We're trying to iterate quickly to address our users concerns, so keep the feedback coming — super helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Holy shit, the UI is really impressive. Genuinely impressed with your front- end engineering! It was insanely fluid, I kept thinking how much better it is compared to most native iOS/Mac OS applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Glad you like it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have achieved burnout on "find a job" sites. One time I spent an hour registering and making a profile for a (different!) "find startups" site and got told, after all that, that I'd have to indicate a willingness to relocate to Boston, SF, or NYC if I wanted my profile to be searchable.

I'm sure their A/B metrics were better by waiting until the end for that distracting information.

Again, that was a different site. That's probably unfair for this site. It's just that I anticipate having my time wasted now.

 _EDIT_ I just tried to upload my .rtf resume and it said it wasn't an acceptable format. "Word, PDF, text, and HTML only."

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch! I just updated the file extension list and that's pushing up the pipe. Interestingly, I allowed it in the "accept" attribute on the file input, but forgot in my upload code :)

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh, wow. Full account access? If I checked that it would violate all the NDAs. I can't imagine how anybody that's ever signed an employment contract in the Bay Area could do that without violating their employment agreement. That's just a non-starter. Why do you need full access anyways?

<comment><AUTHOR> GitHub accounts are a virtual pre-requisite for a developer at any startup nowadays. Many developers are working on things in private repos and maybe don't have a ton of public activity to display. We offer them the option to connect their full account so that we can parse their activities to show that they are, in fact, active and building things.

Note that we also offer the ability to connect to what is already publicly visible via GitHub if you don't want to grant us full access.

<comment><USER8> >GitHub accounts are a virtual pre-requisite for a developer at any startup nowadays.

I don't think this is true, and if it is, it shouldn't be. I certainly wouldn't care if a candidate didn't have anything to share on GitHub.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely not always true, for sure, but in our experience and with the companies we've worked with, almost unanimously their first comment was always, "Man, it'd be cool if I could see a breakdown of their GitHub data, too." (of course, before we implemented this feature). It's not for everyone and definitely is not the end-all-be-all of what makes a good developer, but many startups today like to see open-source contributions.

<comment><USER9> A GitHub focus on a job site attracts employers who rely on that. I've always deliberately avoided GitHub, so job sites that give it focus aren't for me, because the employers are looking at different metrics than what I have.

Your reasoning makes sense, and it's perfectly fine to do it the way you are. I think people like me are just pointing out that this makes us self-exclude ourselves from the site, in case you wanted us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey guys; do you have any method of pointing out remote-only jobs?

<comment><USER11> It would be nice if the "Browse Companies" section mentioned whether the company considered remote or not.

<comment><USER10> I completely agree! I've been looking for remote work for a while now (kids are in the middle of High School), and it doesn't seem like there are a ton of places to look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the UI - It doesn't look the same as everything else and it works really well. Maybe it's just the colours, but it reminds me quite a bit of New Relic.

The company browser could do with some work - it's very bare bones for now (But it looks like you're aware of this).

Also, I'll second robert_tweed - this appears very US centric. You should either state clearly that you are US only, for the time being, or you should make it a bit more international. Technically it's probably small changes, but right now it gives an unwelcoming impression for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been using the service for a few weeks now. It was interesting that you can set yourself as not actively seeking. It integrates smoothly with Git-HUb, Linked-in, and Stack Overflow. Very clean and responsive design. I wish that the whole app supported mobile as I tend to do most work on my career from my phone. Their team has been very helpful and friendly. I'm personally looking forward to seeing the results that I get.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there any way to delete an account? I can't find any link / setting to do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Send an email to info at mightyspring dot com and we'll take care of it for you. Right now there's no button, but we should probably put one in!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > You'll receive one (1) Bitcoin each time a friend you invite gets a job > through Mighty Spring!

$600?

</comment><comment><USER16> What is the search radius for jobs? I live two hours away from San Francisco, yet it matched me for a job there. Ummm, no thanks. I understand that there will be no jobs in my area, but recommending something two hours away seems a bit too much.

<comment><USER17> MS backend dev here. Are you referring to the Mighty Spring position?

We are automagically matching new signups to our own open positions to both dogfood our product and give users a sense of how the job match process works when they don't have good organic matches.

Sorry if this was confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If your fee is $250 per interview or $15K per hire, does that mean you expect employers to need 60 interviews with MightySpring leads to find a good candidate? Or is there a reason for discounting the interview fees comparatively?

</comment><comment><USER19> I like the idea of passive job searches, but what's this have to offer versus similar services? (Like LinkedIn, Monster, etc)

<comment><USER3> Much better control of incoming opportunities, dramatically improving signal/noise ratio seen on those sites.

Unlike those sites, your information is private on Mighty Spring, so as an employed person you can be more transparent about your search criteria.

Also, hopefully, a much more enjoyable UX :)

<comment><USER19> Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU Mighty spring has pinged me for feedback a few times. They're extremely quick to fix things and will sometimes explain why something is a particular way at the moment. I happily went out of my way to put together images and detailed info for things I noticed because of how approachable they are.

Props, guys and gals.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words — and even more for your feedback. Couldn't have built what we have so far without feedback from folks like yourself. Keep it coming and we'll keep making the product better!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is actually pretty cool - just signed up and everything worked as expected. No idea if it is effective past that but the interface makes sense and asks relevant questions

</comment><comment><USER21> the UI is fantastic. What type of job seekers are you focused on? It looks like there's a technical focus to the listings and the "self" descriptions.

</comment><comment><USER22> I tried this a few months ago and didn't have any luck at all with matches. Maybe I was doing something wrong.

The team however was friendly and very responsive to feedback.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am honestly, honestly blown away by the user experience! Amazing walk through; at no point did I feel anything as a chore.

Very well executed indeed. Kudos to the team.

</comment><comment><USER24> Incredible UI, I signed up even though I'm based in Spain and it seems targeted towards the US. Great fluid sign up experience!

</comment><comment><USER25> Has anyone had success using MightySpring to find a job/find a candidate for a job?

<comment><USER3> Hey, Mighty Spring CEO here: yes, we're making placements with the platform and new people are interviewing every week.

While we're still early-stage and in beta, our candidate and employer base is growing significantly on a weekly basis as well. As a marketplace, this is obviously key to driving more interviews/hires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Are you planning on providing possibility to connect other accounts, e.g. Bitbucket?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm more interested in the tech-stack you're using - if willing to share!

<comment><AUTHOR> On the backend we're using Python/Flask, MongoDB, Heroku, and AWS. We rolled our own ORM called WhiskeyNode ([https://github.com/texuf/whiskeynode](https://github.com/texuf/whiskeynode)) and an event consumer called PyMonster ([https://github.com/texuf/pymonster](https://github.com/texuf/pymonster)).

On the front end, I rolled my own custom framework. I use Handlebars for templating and various mini-libraries for some functionality (shout out to Modernizr, Isotope, and Bespoke :) in addition to jQuery. For CSS I use Compass/SASS. I actually wrote a blog post about it ([http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/58803131171/purposefully-a...](http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/58803131171/purposefully- architecting-your-sass))

I think that covers it!

<comment><USER27> That's pretty cool! Figured about Python (saw gunicorn in HTTP headers). What blew me away, is the fact that you're using a custom framework for the user on-boarding complex/heavily-ajaxified UX... I'd be willing to get updated about how does that scale up!

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, the onboarding experience is pretty silo'd in terms of scripting, although we're thinking about using the same functionality (guided walkthrough) for other parts of the experience, so I may refactor it for reuse elsewhere :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice site and UI! Can you integrate with bitbucket?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely on the roadmap. Any site that helps a potential candidate present themselves to a prospective employer makes sense to connect with. Bitbucket is coming soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> US only?</comment>


Experiences using the F# SAFE stack - <AUTHOR> https://safe-stack.github.io/docs/intro/ <comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone here had experience using the SAFE stack?

I'm interested in learning it with VSCode on Mac but I can't see much feedback about it</comment>


LinkedIn Problems Run Deeper Than Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/23/linkedin-problems-run-deeper-than-valuation/ <comment><USER3> Personally, I've used LinkedIn for recruiting tech talent, being recruited and most recently, doing biz dev (aka sales).

Stray observations: 1\. LinkedIn has too many products like sales navigator that attempt to force you through a specific workflow. While it can work, it feels a lot like a misguided tracking system.

2\. LinkedIn is most useful as an online resume. Whenever I am meeting someone new or want a refresher, I check LinkedIn. I think everyone does this in North America. This doubles as a useful social sign in tool for biz apps.

3\. Older people (40+) in non tech positions respond surprisingly often to InMail. They respond far more often than young techies (who probably get too many messages). This is surprising and extremely useful for my job.

4\. LinkedIn needs contact management in context of career. For example: simply stating when you made this contact is crucial.

5\. LinkedIn needs a way to show how active a profile is or at least indicate if a profile is no longer responsive. There are millions of LinkedIn profiles that are inactive but LinkedIn encourages you to pay to message them.

6\. There needs to be an indicator for how close you are to a specific contact. 99% of the time your mutual contacts are useless. This is especially true for "active users" like myself who see no major disadvantage personally for adding as many contacts as possible.

My whole point is that LinkedIn has an extremely valuable service. It is missing some features and product focus. Many of my above suggestions also help refocus LinkedIn's integrity.

Overall LinkedIn falls into this strange low integrity (in this case, spammy) but somehow successful company. The question is are they going to clean up their act. I think they will.

<comment><USER4> As for point 6: I only connect with people I know. Every once in a while I get a connection request from some random person , but I always say no if I don't know them (even if we are in the same industry).

I think the whole value of connections is diluted otherwise. A connection doesn't mean anything. So that's what I see as the disadvantage of adding as many contacts as possible.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you in principle and in the past only accepted connection requests from people I know as well. However, I think LinkedIn's promise as professional social network has really diminished over the years and mostly functions as nothing more than a job board at this point. I probably have about 100 recruiters I have never met in person in my network. As a contract dev updating my profile serves as a way to push notify these people that I'm in the market. It's really the only value I see left in the platform.

<comment><USER6> It's your choice to add 100 random recruiters to your network. But then, don't complain that you are being spammed by recruiters.

<comment><USER7> I've "unfriended" recruiters I've mistakenly added in the past.

However, if you're looking for talent, it is helpful to have such "connectors" in your network - without those recruiters, when I was doing a check on my network I didn't see some of the people I was trying to hire - this was only the case when I had switched jobs/domains.

<comment><USER8> Wow, how do you unfriend people? I've looked for a way for years.

<comment><USER9> Linkedin -> Connections tab -> filter by "connections only" -> find the one you wanna unfriend in the list and mouse over it -> "more" -> remove connection

<comment><USER8> That is just about as buried as I thought it would be if indeed it was possible. Classic LinkedIn, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This isn't a bad article, but it's extremely one-sided, from the POV of tech employees, which are still the vast minority of workers. Yes, it's spammy and yes, they use dark patterns, and yes, there should have been some better ethical governance since the beginning, but it's not as bad at what it aims to do as a lot of people believe. Even if you just consider it a business card holder -- there's actual value there. Add in facilities to empower connections between people who don't know each other, or who only share connections, and it's pretty powerful. I think they can successfully navigate through this critical spot and emerge much stronger on the other side. They just need to refocus on what the core value propositions are.

<comment><USER11> I was coming to say this. From the article:

"Spotting the best talent is actually far easier with tools like Talentbin, Stack Overflow, and Github, which aggregate or facilitate positive interactions and allow skilled individuals to display their work — showing why they're good at what they do."

So that covers technical people, technical people and, er, technical people. What if I want to find a PR Agency? Or a company to refurnish my office?

<comment><USER12> Or hire a PM? Or HR? Or marketing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not so bearish on LinkedIn.

It serves a few useful purposes:

1 - Before any meeting I look to see if there's something I share in common (person, interest, job, etc) with the other person. This was especially important when I was in Sales.

2 - When I was job hunting, I did a lot of "Look up the job, then see if I knew someone who knew someone at the company" that would've been impossible without it.

3 - I use it for recruiting. The response rate is very low when HR uses it, but as the hiring manager it isn't too bad.

LinkedIn has the highest value users of any service - professionals making good money. If they can figure out good ways to monetize it, they'll blow through their current valuation issues.

<comment><USER14> You are not so bearish as a user, are you planing to invest though even at current valuation?

<comment><USER13> Good question. If I actively invested in individual tech stocks, I probably would. But that's a big if. :-) For now I'm talking like a researcher rather than a trader.

My investing strategy has been to invest in large indexes with low expense ratios. For diversification against my human capital, I slightly lean against tech (S&P over Nasdaq) and for personal reasons I try to get some overseas exposure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was in product at LinkedIn, and I thought this was spot on. LinkedIn is a two-sided platform. Increasingly the revenue model undermines user engagement. To some extent, one side no longer builds the other, one subtracts from the other. LinkedIn is a platform for spam more than it is a platform for content.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two- sided_market](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market)

<comment><USER16> It sounds like you are suggesting a minimalist version of LinkedIn intended to break even [rather than VC-level profitable] is a good idea. ;)

<comment><USER15> Hah, fair point. I just think they've gone a little too far on the greed side. No doubt as part of being public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really like how every negative thing is rationalized away until shit hits the fan and then every negative thing becomes a reality because all of a sudden it gets reported. LinkedIn is still the same shitty service it was before. Move along. Nothing to see here. It's just before it was overvalued and overhyped.

</comment><comment><USER18> LinkedIn is a great example of how your platform can be useful to people in spite of a horrible UI, bad infrastructure, and grossly inconsistent user experience.

I swear the amount of times I wasn't sure if I actually accepted or sent a connection request is way too high. The endorsements are begging to be rigged, and the website is absolutely dismal in terms of social functionality - <USER2> pales in comparison to almost every other social media platform.

The only reason it's still popular is because it doesn't need to be any better to do the one thing it does best, which is to be a search engine for recruiters.

That all being said, I maintain an active linkedin profile and I use it regularly.

<comment><USER19> I think endorsements are actually a non-product -- sort of like the "close doors" button on the elevator.

My sense is that LinkedIn doesn't use endorsements in any other dimension of the site. It's just an engagement tool, so that people are on the site longer. That way they see more ads -- and are perhaps more likely to tweak their profiles.

<comment><USER20> I work at LinkedIn, we actually do use skills in a number of places (like the job pages); typically they are used more of a "here's how your skills compare to other people's" and less of a "you'll get hired if you have skill X listed". We know people can game them, so we try to only use their skills in ways that would be helpful if their skills are actually real to give less incentive for people to lie.

<comment><USER21> As implemented, they're basically useless. Asking "does X know about Y?" without verifying that I have any knowledge of Y myself doesn't do much. My dentist has endorsed me for things like "Cloud", and while he's a great guy and good at his job he can barely work his iPad.

I personally view those as noise at best and very skeptically at worst -- if someone has a bunch of endorsements for a particular skill I suspect they actually don't know much about it.

<comment><USER18> > if someone has a bunch of endorsements for a particular skill I suspect they > actually don't know much about it.

I disagree with your reasoning here. While I agree endorsements are useless, I also believe that makes them more or less meaningless. I don't think jumping to conclusions based on endorsements, weather positive or negative, is a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FWIW, I still get value from LinkedIn. The best parts for me:

\- one place for contact information

\- job offers (most of the ones I receive are relevant)

\- being able to "check people out", i.e. see where they have worked before, common contacts etc

I'm in Sweden (if that's relevant). I wrote more about it here: [http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or- bad/](http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or-bad/)

<comment><USER22> I concur, most of the job offers I get are relevant and some of the big companies' internal recruiters contact me via LinkedIn: Google, Facebook, Amazon. It may not be perfect but it's far from useless. My impression is that it allows _skilled_ recruiters to make solid connections and lookups. Poor recruiters will always be poor matchers and spam folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yet the alternatives the article proposes are mostly for coders and tech folks. Business people only have LinkedIn. However bad LinkedIn can be, it's still the only tool around for some people. I think the problem is that for some jobs is very difficult to show your skills. A good finance guy has a very hard time showing off vs say, a programmer - there is no github or SOF for finance guys, question is: can there be one?

</comment><comment><USER24> I have a LinkedIn profile because I was led, back in the day, to think that was the best way to put myself out there for businesses to find and hire me. I don't think I've gotten more than 50 views in the entire time I've had the thing, which is blown away by my personal website (which is still a tiny number of views, but swamps LinkedIn).

That and every time I connect with someone or make the mistake of clicking on their emails, I end up with 20 more bloody emails over the next few days for job offers I don't want (drywall contractor this past one, no joke) or people I don't know who are trying to connect with me (most likely recruiters).

I really don't know why I don't delete the thing.

<comment><USER25> On the flip side, I get a ton of views of my profile. I indiscriminately accept recruiter requests, because it increases the spread of second and third-degree connections who'll see me in searches. I get two orders of magnitude more profile views than does my website, and I've turned off every email LinkedIn wants to send me.

But, then, I'm a consultant, and having people find me is important. A lot of the messages I get are useless--but enough aren't that I effectively don't need to advertise.

<comment><USER26> I agree. I'm also a consultant and my biggest disappointment is how LinkedIn is aligned almost exclusively with full-time employment. It's really a waste of my money as I get all my gigs via real-world connections from previous clients. I've been wishing for years that LinkedIn would add more consulting- specific features (this is the era of the "gig economy" after all, right?) but it doesn't happen. I only maintain a profile because in the U.S. not having one means you don't exist (to too many people anyway).

<comment><USER27> LinkedIn is actually going into precisely that sector, but it hasn't been publicized very well. See LinkedIn Profinder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "LinkedIn is not, in fact, a business network — individuals on LinkedIn represent themselves, not their businesses."

Accordingly, business attire is not, in fact, business attire, since people are dressed up as people not as businesses.

What a waste of bandwidth...

<comment><USER29> I didn't get that either. What would a "proper" business network look like? Everyone connects with other companies' presences through their own company's presence?

Similarly, the advice offered by the article was vague pablum. One example:

> _The company needs to simplify its number of revenue streams and make sure > that they work in concert with its user engagement and growth strategy, > rather than in conflict._

Sure. How? Kind of like saying "the company needs to increase revenue by making more money".

<comment><USER30> The revenue thing is addressing a conflict in LinkedIn's approach. The value in the platform is the users but their monetization of that platform tends to drive off users (due to being spammy). So they are saying they need to find a monetization system that encourages user growth rather than detracts from it.

You may not agree with that, but that's their logic. It's not quite as tautological as you make it seem.

<comment><USER29> I understand what the article was saying and I don't disagree. In fact, I'm saying it's obvious. Your explanation effectively repeated it, using equally vague terms.

And that was my point. The author says that LinkedIn needs to find a completely different revenue model in midstream that works for them and that its users love. Do you think there's really a revelation in there? Do you think that's never occurred to LinkedIn (or anyone who's paying attention)?

Making vague and obvious statements as a commentator is also easy. For the article to have value, it should have offered some concrete examples of how these problems could be solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> LinkedIn's job search interface is pretty bad for tech employees. There's so many better options out there. But there's nothing better for getting quality recruiters to notice you than LinkedIn.

<comment><USER32> It might be great if your goal is to get "recruiters to notice you" which might be OK if you don't already have a job (it's better than nothing). But in my experience, recruiter attention is insufficient if your goal is getting a _better_ job. I tried the LinkedIn thing for a while (and still maintain an account there, because who knows?), but it basically resulted in a lot of recruiter contacts and plenty of interviews, but apparently not a lot of companies that were actually serious about hiring. They seem to mostly be the dog jobs too, the crap "opportunities" that employers couldn't immediately fill so they have to use recruiters. And in this job market, if you can't immediately fill a position, you ought to take a good look at what's wrong with that position.

You'll also have a hard time using it to change job function or for a career upgrade. If your profile says "Senior Software Engineer" you'll just get a bunch of recruiters spamming you to be "Senior Software Engineer" at some other company. They'll never reach out to you and say, "hey how would you like to try being tech lead, or managing a team of engineers?" The site's obviously automated "suggested jobs" are also carbon copies of whatever it is you're already doing, too.

Needless to say, I don't bother much with LinkedIn anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've never really found LinkedIn useful for recruiting, at least within fields I've ever cared about (startups, security, infrastructure, satcom).

It is sometimes useful for sales/partnerships. "Who do I know at BigCo, or who do I know who can introduce me to BigCo".

</comment><comment><USER34> LI is irreplaceable right now as a business networking and lead tool, but maddening and getting worse daily in terms of UX. I already pay hundreds on it and ready to pay thousands as it's easily worth that to my business.

But I'm spending that money grudgingly and always reluctant to upgrade because although it saves me time and effort overall, it also wastes my time every day due to crappy UX, badly implemented SPA type functionality, and hateful mobile experience if you don't want to use their app (LI: I will never use your app if it needs access to my contacts list, particularly given the way you leverage that valuable and private info).

That's a really really stupid position for an incumbent to put themselves in as they will inevitably get their lunch eaten by an upstart at some point.

</comment><comment><USER35> I mostly use LinkedIn to snoop on people I went to high school with.

</comment><comment><USER36> LinkedIn uses too many dark patterns. I'd like to "link" with recruiters but not have them pollute my graph. They really have pooped up the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think the author just made this up in an hour with some weak arguments.

No doubt LinkedIn is becoming very spammy from all the puzzles and (gasp) personal stuff like 'My son-in-law is having an operation, please pray for him'.

However, the value that most people derive from it and the ease with which you can ignore the spam will keep it being used until there is non-spammy, non- recruiter funded and 'open networking' alternate.

</comment><comment><USER38> I click on LinkedIn every day. I like the news feed, my network provides useful stuff to read that I wouldn't find otherwise.

I have connections that are more appropriate than on Facebook because our relationships are professional social not friend social. I don't want their baby pictures & holiday photos but I do want to hear about their business and comment on their business writing.

<comment><USER39> I've started a private slack group for my most active friends and business associates.

I like that better than linkedin.

<comment><USER38> Good for you. Lots of my associations are pretty loose though. I have no way to influence their decisions. I'm connected with them on LI because they were already there.

I only joined because my University recommended it but then I found out I liked it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This reads like a hit piece for some reason.

<comment><USER41> "LinkedIn is now, at best, a business card holder. At worst, it's a delivery service for spam."

I see that, but I also don't find any of the critiques particularly egregious.

<comment><USER42> They're all just a tad limited in scope. I guess it makes sense since I would think TC's primary demographic is technical people (I can't back this up though, may not be accurate). In general though, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> When I still had a LinkedIn account, I noticed that being an attorney on LinkedIn made me a magnet for scammers -- mostly folks attempting to get me to deposit bad checks in my trust account. They were a couple steps up from the typical 419 scam, though fortunately were still easily detected. Between that and the crappy articles that people would post in my stream, I eventually decided that I got less than zero value from LinkedIn membership.

</comment><comment><USER44> I would hate it if LinkedIn fails to be successful as I'm a frequent IN user. I agree with the fact that 40+ people tend to reply sooner than others. This is one of the reasons I'm on IN as my target audience is on it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Linkedin is a necessary evil. HR uses it to check out my references and that's about it. I visit it only when I need to find a job - to update the details on my last job. It's OK, just don't give them your phone number or (real) email address and you won't get hassled.

</comment><comment><USER46> Well, I keep hearing people say things like "I hate LinkedIn" or "LinkedIn is so annoying" randomly at work or in business travel.

It's a small data point, but it seems that perhaps there is a negative sentiment growing around LinkedIn.

<comment><USER47> This article actually prompted me to finally get around to deleting my LinkedIn account

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> LinkedIn's best shot at remaining relevant and growing is if they can turn Pulse into something businesses can get real value from.

</comment><comment><USER49> <iframe src="//news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167853"></iframe><a href="[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167853"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167853") title="TEst">T</a>s

</comment><comment><USER50> If you think there's a lot of recruiter spam on LinkedIn, I dare you to have a look at my email inbox. :P

</comment><comment><USER49> find something!!<a href="/">t a</a>f

</comment><comment><USER51> E</comment>


Stroke of insight - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU <comment><USER2> Saw this on TED! Powerful story

</comment><comment><USER3> Really hate this meme of "right brain is parallel processor, left brain is serial processor." Biologists cannot keep pretending that this is a valid comparison without any objective evidence. [1]

[1] Especially if they keep saying "we are energy beings." Please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Next November/December let us know what you think. I plan to continue to post this annually.</comment></comment>


Computing a Risk Estimate Using Netflix's Riskquant - <AUTHOR> https://nodramadevops.com/2020/02/computing-a-risk-estimate-using-netflixs-riskquant/ <comment><USER2> I've been looking for a reason to dig into this tool. For those who haven't heard of RiskQuadrant, Netflix put out an article about the project about two weeks ago: [https://medium.com/@NetflixTechBlog/open-sourcing- riskquant-...](https://medium.com/@NetflixTechBlog/open-sourcing-riskquant-a- library-for-quantifying-risk-6720cc1e4968). The project itself is at: [https://github.com/Netflix-Skunkworks/riskquant](https://github.com/Netflix- Skunkworks/riskquant).

<comment><AUTHOR> (Author) The `riskquant` tool is really cool and the library is even cooler. I'm excited that tech folks are starting to quantify risks for their quickly changing systems.

Risk management in tech/cybersecurity is really immature compared to other domains like structural engineering (earthquakes), finance (portfolio risk position), or environmental health and safety.

riskquant and similar tools do the critical work of making proven risk analysis methods accessible in delivery pipelines and deployment platforms for inclusion in continuous risk monitoring systems and scaling periodic risk analysis activities.</comment></comment>


Energy talk: Nuclear vs Coal. But what about wind, water, sun? - <AUTHOR>

Due to recent events, I've witnessed a few Twitter fights debating nuclear safety, viability, and coal energy.
But I'm wondering why people discuss water, wind, and sun energy less seriously. Where I live, we have an option to get a major chunk of our home's energy from these sources. (And yes, I use this option.)
I've always assumed that these three sources (nicknamed "renewable" in Oregon power companies) just suffered from the "organic catch-22." There's not much of it, because people don't buy it, because there's not much of it, because people don't buy it.
But in the back of my mind, I assumed that if infrastructure slowly moved over, we could actually live in a world run by this stuff.
I've also seen and read about very big businesses powered by these energy sources.
But now I'm feeling like an ignorant dork. People who I respect don't even bring up the renewable trio when discussing nuclear vs coal energy. I can only assume there's something really inefficient about them that everybody knows about except for me.
Anybody truly informed about it wanna chime in? Though I may ask further questions, I am not trying to start anything contentious. <comment><USER2> Water, wind and sun won't displace nuclear and carbon-based energy for a number of reasons, cost being foremost. The best that "renewable" energy can do is temper demand for carbon-based energy.

The only reasonable replacement for the power infrastructure we have today is fusion power, but that's between 10 and 50 years away from commercial viability depending on who you listen to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this cost like "organic" cost? (In that organic things get cheaper the more that gets produced).

Is there hope of renewable energy sources getting cheaper if they get more ubiquitous? In Portland we have a major wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas (<http://www.vestas.com>. They are from Europe, but have a big location here).

I guess my question is, the blades + farms get cheaper in large quantities, like anything else. So it seems the cost part could get better. But if they simply can't make enough power, that seems harder to conquer. Are you saying these things can't make enough power? (I suspect everybody knows this except for me.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [Update. I'm slightly more educated than I was a few hours ago.]

I've found two reports that outline ways to migrate to renewables. They are sobering, but actually achievable.

A common thread among those who create actual concrete plans for running on renewable energy is this: _We must use less energy to have our energy needs met by renewable sources._

(Their projections do account for the growth of newly industrialized nations, so it's not double-trouble.)

Some of the use-less-energy changes we would notice (how we get the food that reaches our table), and other changes we could integrate and not notice at all (lots of energy escapes buildings for no good reason, and that could change with different process + design becoming more dominant).

A cool part is that they don't see higher cost as long-term issue (that renewable energy is only temporarily expensive because it's uncommon and used in small doses).

Another kinda optimistic thing is that parts of the world that are still becoming "industrialized" have somewhat of an advantage (as they do with leapfrogging any kind of tech generation), and in some cases are being born with more renewable systems to begin with.

I completely understand those who overlook renewable sources because of the amount of energy we _currently_ use is more than we can produce with them. It's not a dumb conclusion. But after going over these reports, I don't think using less energy is any more of an imposition than changing any other kind of infrastructure, and in many cases is stuff we're moving towards anyway.

[http://getsatisfaction.com/wwf/topics/debate_the_energy_repo...](http://getsatisfaction.com/wwf/topics/debate_the_energy_report) [http://assets.panda.org/downloads/101223_energy_report_final...](http://assets.panda.org/downloads/101223_energy_report_final_print_2.pdf) [pdf, pdf, pdf! i warned you] [http://www.greenpeace.org/er- ship/Global/international/publi...](http://www.greenpeace.org/er- ship/Global/international/publications/climate/2010/summary.pdf) [pdf]</comment>


WhatsApp Will Never Be Secure - <AUTHOR> https://telegra.ph/Why-WhatsApp-Will-Never-Be-Secure-05-15 <comment><USER2> I really want to like Telegram (it's certainly a handy gateway to my attempts at getting people off Facebook Messenger) but this article seems pretty misleading & reads like a marketing grab

_Disclaimer: This thread is mostly based off of a sporadic interest in this space, not necessarily up-to-date research of counterpoints_

A few observations in no particular order:

\- Telegram use their own proprietary encryption algorithm which has had some questions raised in the crypto community

\- Telegram appear to do a fair bit of hand-waving re. distinguishing their end-to-end "secure" messaging vs. the default (and more convenient) group and non-secret messages - which are encrypted differently, and cloud-archived similarly to what the article describes WhatsApp doing.

      - Not that there's necessarily a satisfactory alternative, but a privacy-first solution would ideally be more overt

\- Article never mentions Signal (either the protocol, or the competing application) which have undergone significant peer review, but does refer to Telegram as distinguishing itself through open source and open process.

\- One can't help but question the motive of a crypto-first app which doesn't follow crypto best practice, or at least speak candidly about their attempts to iteratively improve this.

\- Telegram seem to be making moves towards an increasingly "social media messenger" space - does this run at odds with privacy-first? (my guess would be it does)

\---

Some links:

\- [Is Telegram Secure? (security stack exchange)]([https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is- telegr...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram- secure))

\- [white paper analysis of Telegram's crypto]([https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf))

\- [Signal's Moxie Marlinspike on Telegram's founder]([https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/18/signal-moxie- marlinspike-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/18/signal-moxie-marlinspike- techcrunch-disrupt-sf-2017-telegram/))

EDIT: formatting

<comment><USER3> I use Telegram and so does my friends despite I (primarily) know about the questionable security.

And the reasons are very simple: Because it's packed with features and it's user interface is so extremely well done it simply outclasses any other option in those regards.

Second, our normal level of communication simply does not require perfect security. Being on Telegram or as a group on a bus being overheard by everyone would make no difference. No one of us cares because it doesn't matter.

I talk to my family and spouse over "normal" Telegram, and it's the same thing there. When we need to talk about intimate things we do so eye-to-eye, and even if it would become public I believe audience would find TV soap operas more exciting.

What I am saying our choices are dictated by convenience and enjoyment. Signal, Riot and Wire provides none of those compared to Telegram.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget about the native (i.e., not electron based), fast, cross- platform, desktop app.

Unlike other platforms, you don't need to have your phone on and connected all the time to use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best approximation of security in this space should be an open- implementation of an open-source protocol that can be easily audited.

As far as I know, the only app that fits this requirement with a minimum viable community such that it can be used day to day is Signal.

<comment><USER6> Real questions, which will sound like a conspiracy theory:

\- Is being open source, and some eager and independent security researchers having done an audit enough to convince you (or some other well-informed part on the thread) that no clever flaws are intentionally in the source?

\- Do the funding or institutions which support the development of a piece of tech change the answer to the above question? E.g. I've been encouraged to avoid Signal b/c it was created partly with US State Dept funding (via the Open Technology Fund). The main point made during that conversation was that the US supports projects like Signal and Tor as a means of supporting dissidents in other countries. But a side implication was that it may be naive to rely on tools (indirectly) provided by the state to avoid surveillance by the state.

<comment><USER5> The way I view this, funding can definitely raise suspicion. But The open sourcing of the protocols should help to remove those suspicions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First lesson taught at IBM for mainframe programmers: _" There is no such thing as computer security, only the appearance of security."_</comment>


How to prevent systemd installation on Ubuntu 14.04 and other Debian-based distros - <AUTHOR> https://ervinb.github.io/2017/01/28/prevent-systemd-installation-on-ubuntu-and-debian/ <comment><USER2> This is a losing battle. May as well cut your losses and use a distro that doesn't use Systemd.

There is now a predictable pattern of Systemd devs and supporters trying to persuade developers to get more and more functionality to depend on Systemd. It started with Gnome, logind, udev, consolekit and recent attempts to get apps to depend on Systemds dns server show it is a ongoing process.

In the end its critical for end users to develop funding models for open source. Without this, accountability will continue to shift away from users to corporates like Redhat and their interests. And users will be forced to accept whatever is thrown their way or move away.

<comment><USER3> To me, the article wasn't in the vein of "how-to-never-run-systemd-ever-and- be-a-linux-hermit", it was more of a "hey, it's here to stay, but it _will_ break your stuff, so here's a temporary way to prevent it from installing on your 4-year-old-distro".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Or just install systemd-shim and call it a day.

<comment><USER5> Does that satisfy a package-defined dependency on systemd? If not, it won't solve anything here.

<comment><USER6> If the dependency can be satisfied by systemd-shim, the package will depend on "systemd | systemd-shim". This means that if you have neither installed, systemd would be installed. If you have systemd-shim installed then it's fine with that.

There are packages that really do depend on systemd, and so they would not have their dependencies satisfied.

If you really hate systemd that much that you want to put in effort to keep it out, I would seriously suggest putting in some contributions to alternative init systems and patches for software that requires systemd to have fallbacks to work on those init systems.

If you're desperately trying to keep systemd out of your system then maybe you shouldn't upgrade your system (think LTS releases) until you've figured out how your applications work with systemd.

systemd is not going away, posts like this are OK for those who have been hit with surprises, but anyone that thinks this ignoring systemd is a viable long term fix is delusional.

<comment><USER7> > anyone that thinks this ignoring systemd is a viable long term fix is > delusional.

As is anyone who doesn't acknowledge there are _always_ alternatives in the open source world.

<comment><USER8> > As is anyone who doesn't acknowledge there are always alternatives in the > open source world.

That's why the GP wrote this:

> I would seriously suggest putting in some contributions to alternative init > systems and patches for software that requires systemd to have fallbacks to > work on those init systems.

The problems that systemd solves and others don't, won't get resolved by closing eyes and hoping for the best. They can get solved by writing code for those alternate init systems.

As an example, is ConsoleKit working already, after all the years of neglect and ignorance of pleads of the desktop environment guys? (Of course not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a hard time finding a hire date for Poettering at Red Hat BTW. It looks like Jeff Johnson (rpm) was hired at Red Hat in 1998.

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't fight it, just let it happen.</comment>


NSA war room modelled after Star Trek - <AUTHOR> http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/9157295/NSA-war-room-modelled-after-Star-Trek

<comment><AUTHOR> And here's the design concept: [http://www.dbia.com/projectpage/LIWA.pdf](http://www.dbia.com/projectpage/LIWA.pdf)

<comment><USER2> With all that exposed metal and black screens, it does look like something from Star Trek... a Klingon Ship. [http://clancmsf.tripod.com/klingon-bridge- st5.jpg](http://clancmsf.tripod.com/klingon-bridge-st5.jpg)</comment></comment>


When central bankers make cartoons, this is what you get... - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PvX625JCs&list=PLDC533E22987C21B6&index=2&feature=plpp_video

<comment><AUTHOR> Before you close it, make sure not to miss the inflation monster at 2:10.. lol

<comment><USER2> And in 4:10, they 'took care of him' ;)</comment></comment>


Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures - <AUTHOR> http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~geijt101/papers/SA2013/ <comment><AUTHOR> Site is getting hammered. Video here:

[http://vimeo.com/79098420](http://vimeo.com/79098420)</comment>